Posts Tagged Gay Men Will Marry Your Girlfriends

First we had College Humor’s “Gay Men Will Marry Your Girlfriends.” Then came the “straight men” response. Now the inevitable “Gay Women Will Marry Your Boyfriends” has debuted. These videos profess to support marriage equality: the original gag was that, if queer men can’t marry their boyfriends, they’ll marry straight guys’ girlfriends in retaliation. However, each new YouTube sensation traffics in such tired stereotypes of gender and sexuality that I have to say to all involved with these clips: Feminists Will Probably Not Marry Any of You. We don’t even want to hang out.

Caricatures can definitely be used to skewer gendered expectations, but these videos don’t critique stereotypes through campy enactment: they reinforce them. After all, the ...